Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor

By Bridget Whearty

Medieval manuscripts are our shared inheritance, and today they are more accessible than ever—thanks to digital copies online. Yet for all that widespread digitization has fundamentally transformed how we connect with the medieval past, we understand very little about what these digital objects really are. We rarely consider how they are made or who makes them. This case study-rich book demystifies digitization, revealing what it's like to remake medieval books online and connecting modern digital manuscripts to their much longer media history, from print, to photography, to the rise of the internet.

Examining classic late-1990s projects like Digital Scriptorium 1.0 alongside late-2010s initiatives like Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, and world-famous projects created by the British Library, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Stanford University, and the Walters Art Museum against in-house digitizations performed in lesser-studied libraries, Whearty tells never-before-published narratives about globally important digital manuscript archives. Drawing together medieval literature, manuscript studies, digital humanities, and imaging sciences, Whearty shines a spotlight on the hidden expert labor responsible for today's revolutionary digital access to medieval culture. Ultimately, this book argues that centering the modern labor and laborers at the heart of digital cultural heritage fosters a more just and more rigorous future for medieval, manuscript, and media studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781503634190

Book preview

DIGITAL CODICOLOGY

Medieval Books and Modern Labor

BRIDGET WHEARTY

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2023 by Bridget Whearty. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Whearty, Bridget, author.

Title: Digital codicology : medieval books and modern labor / Bridget Whearty.

Other titles: Text technologies.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Series: Stanford text technologies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022010955 | ISBN 9781503632752 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503634190 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Manuscripts, Medieval—Digitization—Case studies. | Codicology—Technological innovations—Case studies. | Digital humanities—Case studies.

Classification: LCC Z110.R4 W47 2022 | DDC 091.0285—dc23/eng/20220606

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010955

Cover images: (Manuscript) Page spread from Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis, a Book of Hours from the latter half of the 15th century, Ghent. Mss Codex MO379CB, Stanford University Libraries, Special Collections; (hand) Flickr | WOCinTech, under CC 2.0 license

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Typeset by Elliott Beard in Spectral 10/15

STANFORD

TEXT TECHNOLOGIES

Series Editors

Elaine Treharne

Ruth Ahnert

Editorial Board

Benjamin Albritton

Caroline Bassett

Lori Emerson

Alan Liu

Elena Pierazzo

Andrew Prescott

Matthew Rubery

Kate Sweetapple

Heather Wolfe

CONTENTS

Note on Manuscript Designations

Illustrations and Tables

Preface: Vanishing Act

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION. Embodied Books, Disembodied Labor

1. Scriptorium 2.0

2. Value and Visibility

3. Digital Incunables

4. Interoperable Metadata and Failing toward the Future

CODA. Glitch

Appendix: Doing Digital Codicology

Notes

Bibliography

Index

NOTE ON MANUSCRIPT DESIGNATIONS

THE FIRST TIME A MANUSCRIPT is mentioned in a chapter, the full shelfmark is given. Later references in the same chapter use the following shortened forms:

ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES

Preface

Figure P.1. Henry Noel Humphreys, Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century. The blur in the lower right corner of the scan is the hand of an anonymous digitizer, wearing a pink finger cot.

Introduction

Figure I.1. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. MSS El 26 C 9, The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. Screenshot of the Object Description metadata as it appeared in the Huntington Digital Library, ca. 2019.

Figure I.2. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. MSS El 26 C 9, fol. ir. Screenshot of the first image in the digital copy of MSS El 26 C 9 as it appeared in the Huntington Digital Library, ca. 2019.

Figure I.3. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. MSS El 26 C 9. Screenshot of the Item Description metadata, including information about the manuscript’s digitization, as it appeared in the Huntington Digital Library, ca. 2019.

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1. Benchmarking the digitization of Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379.

Figure 1.2. Golden Thread device-level color target by Image Science Associates, similar to the one used in the digitization of Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379.

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1. Medieval copy machine cartoon, original mise-en-page in The Crab, May 1990. Created by an unknown cartoonist, unknown date.

Figure 2.2. Screenshot showing the first lines of an untitled begging poem, with correction in the first line of Huntington Library, San Marino, MS HM 111 fol. 41r, as it appeared in the Huntington Digital Library, ca. 2021.

Figure 2.3. The Huntington Library, San Marino, HM 111, fol. 16v. The first lines of La Male Regle, showing Hoccleve’s inconparable.

Figure 2.4. George Mason, Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, Never Before Printed (1796). The first lines of La Male Regle, showing Mason’s correction of inconparable to incomparable.

Figure 2.5. Cambridge, Harvard University, Houghton Library, Horblit TypPh Album 30, Phillipps Ms. 20976, seq. 80. Calotype showing a bifolium from what is now Berlin, Phillipps 1745; original photography by Amelia Guppy, ca. 1850.

Figure 2.6. Cambridge, Harvard University, Houghton Library, Horblit TypPh Album 51, Phillipps Ms. 23287, seq. 27. Salt print showing an opening from what is now National Library of Wales, Cardiff MS 2.81; original photography by Charles Phillipps, ca. 1858–59.

Figure 2.7. Frederick J. Furnivall, Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1: The Minor Poems (1892). The first lines of Hoccleve’s untitled begging poem.

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1. The Fall of Princes, New York, Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Plimpton MS 255. Screenshot showing the first view of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in Digital Scriptorium in late 2021.

Figure 3.2. The Fall of Princes, Victoria, University of Victoria Libraries, Ms.Eng.1. Screenshot showing the first view of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in the University of Victoria, Lydgate MS, Fall of Princes boutique project website in late 2021.

Figure 3.3. The Fall of Princes, Victoria, University of Victoria Libraries, Ms.Eng.1. Screenshot showing the first view of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in Samvera, the University of Victoria’s current digital collections management system, in late 2021.

Figure 3.4. The Fall of Princes, © British Library Board. London, British Library, Harley MS 1766. Screenshot showing the first nine thumbnail images as they appeared within the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in late 2021.

Figure 3.5. The Fall of Princes, Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16. Screenshot showing the first image of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in OPenn in late 2021.

Figure 3.6. The Fall of Princes, Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16. Screenshot showing the first image of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in the custom BiblioPhilly viewer in late 2021.

Figure 3.7. The Fall of Princes, Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16. Screenshot showing the first image of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in the Internet Archive in late 2021.

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1. Screenshot showing the MARC record for Binghamton University Libraries, Binghamton, New York, BS2275.N 53 1340, Postilla Litteralis Super Epistolam ad Hebraeos, by Nicholas of Lyra, as it appeared in late 2021.

Table 4.1. Simplified crosswalk, mapping the concept of author across MARC, DC, MODS, and one possible markup option in TEI P5.

Table 4.2. Sample crosswalk, mapping ways of encoding author, scribe, artist, and translator across e-codices DC, Walters Art Museum TEI P5, e-codices TEI P5, and Stanford University Libraries, MODS.

Table 4.3. Sample crosswalk, mapping how the MODS element @displayLabel might be used in MODS to contain manuscript description elements originally marked up in the Digital Walters TEI.

Table 4.4. Sample crosswalk, mapping how marked up content in Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Parker Library, MS 304, TEI P4 markup would have appeared in DMS-Index-style MODS.

Table 4.5. Sample crosswalk, showing the macaronic manuscript description that would be made by combining e-codices DC and TEI into a single DMS-Index MODS record.

Coda

Figure C.1. Chantilly, Musée Condé, Bibliothèque du château, 0297, fols. 53v-54r. Upside-down opening as it appeared in the Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits médiévaux’s instantiation of the Mirador viewer in late 2021.

Figure C.2. The Fall of Princes, © British Library Board. London, British Library, Harley MS 1766. Screenshot of fol.5r, scanned backward, as it appeared within the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in late 2021.

Table C.1. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, the Brut Chronicle to 1449, Siege of Thebes by John Lydgate, Austin, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, MS 143. Sample imaging errors, as they appeared in late 2021.

Figure C.3. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 493. Close-up view of fol. 1r, second stanza of My Complaint by Thomas Hoccleve, as it appeared in Yale Library’s digital collection viewer in late 2021.

Figure C.4. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.102, fol. 33v. Error and correction in Psalm 128, highlighted by the addition of two laboring figures.

Figure C.5. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.102, fol. 39v. Error and correction in Psalm 121, highlighted by the addition of two laboring figures.

Figure C.6. Henry Noel Humphreys, Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century. Most recent update: March 3, 2020; copyist’s hand corrected out of existence.

PREFACE

VANISHING ACT

ON AUGUST 28, 2006, an unnamed woman employed within the Scanning Operations, or ScanOps, division of Google digitized Henry Noel Humphreys’s Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century. A Series of Twelve Plates from Richly Illuminated Manuscripts, Executed in Exact Imitation of the Originals (London, 1 853)—a collection of chromolithographic plates re-creating content from medieval manuscripts that Humphreys found particularly beautiful and worth copying (fig. P.1). The colors in the digital copy are raucous, and plate 7 is particularly striking, bursting with magentas and fuchsias that wildly exaggerate the subdued brick reds and paler pinks found in hard copies of this book.¹

The first and most obvious lesson of the image, thus, is that the act of digitizing fundamentally transforms books, creating not close mimetic representations of hard-copy exemplars but new copies, at times garish, always entrancing. Lesson two, taught by the brilliant blur of the digitizer’s hand, is that digital books are created by real human labor that often goes invisible, misunderstood, and unacknowledged. But just because end users are not in the habit of seeing them does not mean that the labor and laborers are not there. Books do not leap by magic onto our screens. Whether by happy accident or deliberate design, traces of humans who do the work of digital bookmaking can almost always be found. Lesson three is that information is vanishing. Until March 3, 2020, the digitizer’s hands were visible in her book. A black-and-white photograph showed her turning the book’s opening flyleaves, preserving a glimpse of a diamond ring on her left hand. The color scan of plate 7 froze her fingers as a blur of action, her fingertips covered with pink plastic cots. Now, not even those traces remain. Google Books uses an algorithm to correct and remove errors from its scans. On March 3, 2020, those automated improvements erased this digitizer, cutting her from the end product and polishing the previously blurred corner to a humanless perfection. The sudden erasure of this creator’s hands—nearly fourteen years after she made this new digital copy of a nineteenth-century copy, of a sixteenth-century copy, of an older medieval book—powerfully demonstrates how digital copies are not static. They are complicated, changeable objects, and they each carry their own stories of labor, community, erasure, and care. In Digital Codicology, I tell some of these hidden stories of digitized medieval books, connecting modern acts of copying to their medieval predecessors and also to experiments like Humphreys’s Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts from the Middle Ages that sought to reproduce medieval books in emerging media long before the rise of the internet and digital repositories.

Figure P.1 Henry Noel Humphreys, Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century. A Series of Twelve Plates from Richly Illuminated Manuscripts, Executed in Exact Imitation of the Originals (London, 1853), plate 7; itself copied and adapted from Sir John Soane’s Museum, Volume 137 (fol. 82v), a sixteenth-century book of hours. The blur in the lower right corner of the scan is the hand of an anonymous digitizer, wearing a pink finger cot. The digital copy was created by an unnamed employee of Google’s ScanOps division, August 28, 2006. On March 3, 2020, it was updated and these visible traces of the digitizer were erased; see figure C.6. Public domain, Google-digitized, courtesy of HathiTrust. Hard-copy exemplar owned by the University of Michigan.

The story of Henry Noel Humphreys and Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts is a story of copies all the way down. Although Humphreys sells his book of specimen plates as Executed in Exact Imitation of the Originals, his copying is just as transformative as that of Google Books. Sir John Soane’s Museum, volume 137 is a lavishly decorated sixteenth-century book of hours known in scholarship by its older, alternative shelfmark, Sir John Soane’s Museum, MS 4, or more simply as the Soane Hours. Fol. 82v is Humphreys’s original for plate 7 in Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts—but in the Soane Hours the miniature’s border is blue, its acanthus sprays and twigs arranged in different shapes, and the flowers entirely different colors and species from Humphreys’s nineteenth-century exact imitation.² Humphreys, however, is by no means the originator of this chain of transformative copying. As is often the case with medieval manuscripts, and especially with books of hours, the Soane Hours cannot accurately be called the original. As a genre, all books of hours are copies that simultaneously mimic and transform the more complex monastic religious practices from which they are derived. Furthermore, the miniature that Humphreys found so striking in the hard-copy book in Sir John Soane’s Museum, vol. 137 is not original to the Soane Hours, which Elizabeth Morrison has named a virtual compendium of copies mimicking miniatures found in earlier works.³ Dig into the network of copying and transformation that binds together the digital copies, with their analog chromolithographic copies, with their analog manuscript copies, and it becomes clear that there are only copies of copies; each a unique object with its own story to tell about technology, transformation, transmission, and labor, generally uncredited and unseen.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IT IS WONDERFUL, AND TERRIBLE, to write acknowledgments for a project about crediting the often-invisible laborers that have remade medieval books in modern forms. Wonderful, because it gives me a chance to publicly name and thank the many people who have contributed to making this book. Terrifying, because I know these acknowledgments will inevitably be imperfect. Even as I write with the best intentions, I am certain I will leave someone out, or miss naming some key contribution—and thus enact the same kind of accidental erasure that this book argues against and strives to counter. There are digital correctives and addenda that I hope to employ for the gaps that inevitably arise. But, as I also trace throughout this book, digital projects are profoundly changeable, their futures in flux. Thus, any correction I make in the future, like any acknowledgments I write here, can only ever be partial. Nevertheless, it is my hope that in laying out and celebrating some of this project’s many roots and mentors I will succeed in offering even an imperfect portrait of the great generosity, labor, and community that have supported my work and the making of this book.

The ideas for this project began when I was a Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies at Stanford University from 2013 to 2015. I am profoundly grateful to the funders—or, to use more medieval language, the patrons—of that position: to everyone at the Council on Libraries and Information Resources who created and who continue to work on the CLIR postdoc program I got to be part of, and to everyone at the Mellon Foundation who supported the Data Curation for Medieval Studies cohort.

My debts and gratitude to Benjamin Albritton and Elaine Treharne cannot be overstated. As coprincipal investigators of the CLIR postdoc at Stanford, Treharne and Albritton created the position I held and were my direct supervisors. They were also, and continue to be, trusted mentors, supportive and challenging in the best ways. Without either of them, this book would not exist. I remember sitting on the benches outside Meyer Library (now demolished), confessing to Treharne that I had no interest in turning my earlier doctoral research into a book. There was only one truly good idea in it, and surely that could be an article. Instead of dismissing this as unreasonable, she asked me, so what do you want to write instead? A book about manuscripts and digitization, I replied. She answered, Okay, map it out: write me a book proposal. Although the book you are reading bears only passing resemblance to that early plan, it was catalyzed in that moment. It was likewise catalyzed through myriad exchanges with Albritton: from the nuts-and-bolts of metadata, interoperability, crosswalking, and XQuery; to 10,000-foot-view discussions about who digital medieval books exist to serve, and how and why these books get made and maintained in certain ways. His unflappable patience calmed me as a learner, and his trademark intellectual generosity and rigor continue to be my model, as a writer and a teacher. In the years since my postdoc concluded, both Albritton and Treharne have continued to offer invaluable suggestions, explanations, and critiques that have always bettered and pushed this project forward. Elaine, Ben: I can never thank either of you enough.

Heartfelt thanks also go to my anonymous peer reviewers. Peer review fuels academic research. The work is hard and time-consuming—and often unseen, running below the surface of resulting publications. To my reviewers: I see what you have done for me and for this project. While I cannot thank you by name (because I don’t know who you are), please know how grateful I am for the work you have done, for the many gifts you have given me. Your encouragement helped me keep faith with the project in moments of doubt, and your astute critiques have enriched everything, strengthening my thinking and deepening my analysis.

This book is also indebted to my colleagues and former coworkers at the Digital Library Systems and Services Department and at Stanford University Libraries more broadly. My CLIR postdoc is the foundation of this book, and my library colleagues at Stanford helped me build those foundations. To Cathy Aster, Tony Calvano, Tom Cramer, Greta de Grote, Hannah Frost, Tony Navarrete, Laney McGlohon, Lynn McRae, John Mustain, Bess Sadler, Astrid J. Smith, Wayne Vanderkuil, and Laura Wilsey (among many others who I fear I have missed): in formal training sessions, informal lunchtime conversations, and questions and answers shared across cubicle walls, you were unstinting in your support and welcome. I am so thankful for the time I got to be part of your team. As individuals and collectively, you have inspired so much of my thinking and this book.

Since summer 2015, this book has been further supported by many librarians and staff at Binghamton University Libraries. The hardworking staff at Interlibrary Loan under the leadership of Elise Thornley have been indefatigable, helping gather all the materials I needed that my university does not own. Staff in Technical Services and Collections have likewise tirelessly maintained our existing holdings at Binghamton, while also finding ways to purchase materials I needed, even, impressively, in times of severe budget cuts. Metadata librarians Rachel Turner and Laura Evans both provided expert feedback on different iterations of chapter 4, critiquing and vastly improving my work. Amy Gay, assistant head of Digital Initiatives for Digital Scholarship, has been an incredible sounding board. Additionally, without ORB (the Online Repository @ Binghamton), which she manages, the Caswell Test would have remained a one-off conference roundtable rant, instead of growing into what it has become. My colleague Jeremy Dibbell, Special Collections Librarian, has likewise been an invaluable resource, particularly in navigating six hundred years of media history in chapter 2. To all my beloved colleagues at BU Libraries: I am—very happily, and very deeply—in your debt.

Additional, largely invisible labor has been performed by my writing groups. It has been almost a decade since we completed our doctoral work, but my PhD writing group continues on. Jillian Hess, Hannah Doherty Hudson, Rebecca Richardson, and Bronwen Tate: thank you is insufficient for all that we have been and given to each other, all that we continue to give and be, but I simply have no other words. I trust you to read between the lines and know what is there. Since early 2018, I have also benefited from near-daily conversations with Johanna Green, Dot Porter, and Keri Thomas. Johanna, Dot, Keri: you have given invaluable feedback and treasured community, alternately talking me down and lifting me up, and letting me try out some truly wild analogies in our group chats. Special shout-out to Johanna who, in April 2021, performed vital midwifing services for chapter 2—reading it (twice) in the midst of chemotherapy sessions. Johanna: I still cannot believe how you helped fix what was then going by the name of hell chapter—literally, at times, with a chemo drip in your arm, dealing with the return of stage-four cancer, and in the midst of the ongoing global pandemic.

I am profoundly grateful to a number of other friends and colleagues, in and beyond my current institution who have provided additional feedback and support, including Bat-Ami Bar On, Marilynn Desmond, Olivia Holmes, Kathleen Kennedy, John Kuhn, Jeanette Patterson, Diane Scott, Michelle Warren, Anna Wilson, Nancy Um—and Tarren Andrews and Cynthia Turner Camp (medievalist cousins). I also want to express my thanks to the students—undergraduate and graduate—who have worked with me at Binghamton University since 2015. I have learned a great deal with all of you.

Over the years, I have honed these ideas at many conferences and seminars: among them, the Modern Language Association, the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, the Montana Medieval Roundup at the University of Montana, the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford, the Quadrivium Symposium at the University of Glasgow, the Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age at the University of Pennsylvania, the Digital Medieval Manuscript expert meeting hosted by the University of St. Andrews, and the LAMAR Seminar hosted by CMERS Center for Early Global Studies at UCLA. My thanks to the organizers of each of these events, to all the staff behind the scenes involved in the labors of running them, and to my fellow attendees and interlocutors who encouraged and motivated my work on this book.

The writing of this book was financially supported by three fellowships. An Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) Fellowship at Binghamton University released me from teaching one course in Spring 2017. A Dean’s Research Semester at Binghamton released me from all teaching work for one semester in Spring 2018. A one-month Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Glasgow Library in early summer 2019 provided me with vitally important new perspectives. The fact that this book contains color, as well as grayscale, plates is due to financial support generously given by my institutional home, the Department of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric at Binghamton University. Financial assistance for this publication was also provided through the generosity of donors to the Harpur College Advocacy Council Faculty Development Endowment—an endowed fund that invests deeply in the research, creative activities, and professional development of Harpur College of Arts and Sciences faculty at Binghamton University. Through their generous support I was able to hire a professional indexer and license the one high-quality digital image that had to be purchased for this book. I am also deeply grateful to all of the cultural heritage institutions that allowed me to reproduce high-quality screenshots of their digital manuscripts and interfaces at no cost.

In addition to the contributions and support named above, each part of this book carries the fingerprints and contributions of many people, especially those who allowed me to interview them—and write countless follow-up emails—about their involvement in historic digital manuscript projects. Copying, as this book explores, is an imperfect act. I take responsibility and apologize for any errors I have made transmitting information gained in these interviews, and I am thankful to each of you for your time, trust, and stories.

In the preface, Frances Sands, curator of drawings and books at Sir John Soane’s Museum, identified Humphreys’s manuscript original; and Frank Stratikis, Buhr Shelving Facility staff at the University of Michigan Library, kindly performed eyes-on color confirmation of the hard-copy original of plate 7 of Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

In the introduction, the idea to use the Ellesmere Chaucer as an opening case study was inspired by Marilynn Desmond, whose editorial erudition provided a vitally important guiding light to my earliest publication involving digital manuscripts.

Chapter 1 owes profound debts to Astrid J. Smith, who allowed and supported my experiential research with her in 2014 and who has continued to answer questions and read drafts over the years. Wayne Torborg of the Hill Museum and Manuscripts Library also generously shared his expertise on the difficulties of performing image capture on gold leaf.

Chapter 2 is indebted to Vanessa Wilkie, William A. Moffett Curator of Medieval Manuscripts and British History at the Huntington Library, and Andrea Denny-Brown, associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, who made time for lengthy interviews in April 2021 and follow-up emails, and who subsequently read and improved my drafts. Helen Spencer and Daniel Wakelin helped substantially in the sections on Furnivall, Burrow, and Doyle—performing for me additional, time-consuming labor that I could not do myself, due to ongoing COVID-19 travel restrictions.

Chapter 3 is indebted to what feels like the proverbial cast of thousands: for Digital Scriptorium, especially Debra Cashion and Consuelo Dutschke; for the University of Victoria digitization, especially David Badke, Jonathan Bengston, and Heather Dean; for the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, especially Kathleen Doyle, Eleanor Jackson, Peter Kidd, and Andrew Prescott; for Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, Elizabeth Fuller at the Rosenbach Museum and Library; and at the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Jessie Dummer, Doug Emery, Nicholas Herman, Amey Hutchins, Andrea Nuñez, Mick Overgard, Dot Porter, and Jordan Rothschild. This chapter also incorporates material from interviews with Special Collections and Imaging staff at the University of Glasgow, especially Stephen McCann, head of the Photographic Unit.

In addition to my many coworkers, teachers, and mentors at Stanford University Libraries named above, chapter 4 is indebted to the four other members of the 2013–15 CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows in Data Curation for Medieval Studies cohort. Alexandra Bolintineanu, Matthew Evan Davis, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, and Ece Turnator: I am so grateful to each of you, and the work we have gotten to do, together.

The book you are holding in your hands, or viewing on a screen, is also the work of myriad hands—the people at Stanford University Press. Some I know through email and zoom meetings: series editor Ruth Ahnert; press editors Erica Wetter and Caroline McKusick; production editors Susan Karani, Emily Smith, and Gigi Mark; Susan Olin, my copy editor; and Shannon Li, my indexer. Others I have yet to meet as I type these words: Ekaterina Zhigalova, who is processing the art for printing; Rob Ehle, who designed the cover; and Elliott Beard, the compositor for this book. Still others I may never meet at all. Nevertheless, I am profoundly grateful to all of you: the editors; graphics, text, and cover designers; all who, like alchemists, have been part of the production process, doing the hands-on, expert labor of taking digital files and making them into a beautiful book.

*   *   *

A much earlier version of my engagement with the digitization of the Ellesmere Chaucer was published as The Leper on the Road to Canterbury: The Summoner, Digital Manuscripts, and Possible Futures, special issue, Medieval Futures, guest editor, Marilynn Desmond, Mediaevalia 3 6/37 (2015/2016): 2 23–61. Parts of chapter 4 previously appeared as Adam Scriveyn in Cyberspace: Loss, Labour, Ideology, and Infrastructure in Interoperable Reuse of Digital Manuscript Metadata, in Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World, edited by Matthew Evan Davis, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, and Ece Turnator (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2018), reprinted with permission of Arc Humanities Press.

INTRODUCTION

EMBODIED BOOKS, DISEMBODIED LABOR

OPEN A SEARCH ENGINE and enter the terms ellesmere manuscript chaucer. When hyperlinks appear, click the one that leads to the Huntington Library’s digital collections. What is the object that appears on your screen? San Marino, Huntington Library, MSS El 26 C 9 is commonly known as the